Well, today is Sunday, January 5th and we have already made it past Sacramento! We are cooking!! We are on a pace to be debt-free by Spring!!! This is great!!!!

Well, sort of.

You see, periodically my wife makes payments to our two credit cards. They are substantial amounts but they are essentially covering regular costs that we incur. And in many cases, they are recovering less than the expenses we incurred. So, our “progress” is not really progress. In baseball terms, it’s kind of like when the weak-hitting shortstop on your favorite team hits two home runs in the first week. He is on pace to hit 52 home runs but you know that, unless he’s juicing big time, he ain’t gonna hit anywhere close to the 52. In fact, he may hit only 5. We are the weak hitter in this analogy.

So, the progress is fake. But….but….I don’t want to go back to Camarillo! I want to keep going. Fake progress or not, we are in between Williams and Willow, CA and I do not want to go back. This fact alone is motivating me to spend less or put less money on the credit card. Why? Because I want to see real progress.

Now, that brings me to a brief discussion I had with my wife last night over dinner. She was coming down with a bad head cold so the conversation was indeed very brief. And it was mostly one-sided. I asked her if we could make a lot of little payments…or something along those lines. Like a $1 a day or something like that. In other words, I want to take those periodic payments and spread them out so that our progress is more consistent. I want to go from 20 steps forward, 19 steps back to 2 steps forward, 1 step back. I want to see our real progress on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis.

So, our first real step in this journey is to figure out how we’re going to deal with the credit card payment situation and how we can better monitor our progess.

Well, that’s all I have for now. It may be awhile before we hit Oregon, but we will get there.